In my post Monday about Apama, I complained that StreamBase hadn’t offered a rebuttal to some of Apama’s claims. This has now been fixed. Bill Hobbib, StreamBase’s VP of Marketing wrote in. Part of what he had to say was the following.

Adapters to Data Feeds

Your blog comment that adapters doesn’t seem like a key competitive differentiator is accurate, and since adapters are so straightforward to develop with StreamBase as part of a customer engagement, we’ve never found adapters to be a key competitive differentiator. The comment by a competitor that their advantage over StreamBase comes from their having developed more adapters suggests they cannot distinguish themselves based on the other functional capabilities that are important to customers. In reality, our speed/performance and scalability are orders of magnitude superior to competitors, as is the speed with which StreamBase applications are developed, deployed, and modified when business needs change. (If it were easy to develop applications with certain competitive systems, then one might assume they would make free evaluation versions of their product available for download from their websites!)